Remove ads

Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
I feel like broadly the bullishness that people tend to have in these sorts of discussions on militaries beating a zombie plague are a little misguided.

The issue with modern militaries isn't that they'd lose on the field of battle. Obviously a tank brigade or a attack helicopter brigade is going to slaughter any number of zombies. The issue is that how many zombies can a tank kill if it's out of ammunition? How many zombies can a helicopter eliminate if it's out of fuel? Modern militaries are gigantic machines that run on an enormously complex logistical tail. The more disruptions they face the harder it is to fight.

And that's the thing, cannibals eating their way through half of a nation's cities is pretty disruptive! That's the real threat of a zombie plague, not that it will dramatically overwhelm a modern military in a single battle, rather that it will attrit the social-industrial structures which allows a national military to exist to the point where a collapse could begin. And that goes both ways, as the military begins to increasingly lose effectiveness you'd see zombie numbers increasing dramatically which in turn would cause a further decrease in effectiveness as supply lines become even more degraded, so and so forth. That's the real threat of a zombie pandemic, that a feedback loop could start that eventually results in the disintegration of organized opposition. At which point your zombie pandemic has become a zombie apocalypse.
 
Last edited:
Society hasn't collapsed yet, but it's getting close. The supermarket is open, but the manager is trying to find where today's supply truck is. Enough cops have decided to take unauthorized vacation time that the chief of police has been forced to call in everyone left, even though Sgt. Baker really should be at home, recovering from the bite he got last night. The drug store has been stripped bare, and the owner is nursing the black eye she got breaking up a fight over antibiotics. The pastor of one of the local churches has been raving about Armageddon to his congregation for the past few weeks, and setting the entire town on edge. The state governor has issued a stern order to all law enforcement agencies that they are not to shoot American citizens in the middle of the street, just because they have a strange disease. Almost every business is short-staffed, due to people calling in sick, leaving town for the mountains, or just not showing up for work.

The media isn't helping either. It's a bacteria; no, it's a virus. They remember their friends and family; they're rampaging, mindless brutes. Dogs can be infected; the CDC says it just kills animals, doesn't turn them. They can use tools; a locked door stops them. So on and so forth. Then, CNN covers a breaking story. The military has deployed in a small suburb outside a major US city that's overrun with zombies. A massive horde, several million strong are coming against the Army, who has set up defensive positions, and...

It's a complete success. The military wipes out the horde easily, killing most of the city's zombies in a few days. Airstrikes, artillery, armor, they kill the undead in job lots. The majority of them pack up to go to the next city, while the remainder move in to secure the area and rescue survivors. But the army never reaches their next target. Maintenance techs and soldiers get bitten or desert, thinking that they can keep their Ohio family a lot safer if they're in Ohio instead of outside of Atlanta, and a tank with a busted engine isn't much use at all. Supply shipments get more and more irregular as the depots get overwhelmed with requests, and the factories are shut down, meaning nothing new is being made. A few platoons in Humvees roll into the next city, but they're low on food, ammo, gas, parts, everything.
 
Of course, a lot of this depends on what rules zombies operate. Do they swarm? Do they act intelligently? Or do they just vaguely walk towards whatever noise that is attracting them? I could see military be forced to go "Whelp, X area is toast, we are retreating to more defensible position where zombies will be forced into a choke point we can hold".

Plus, how long before new types of castles get formed, because castles are basically perfect defense against zombies as long as you can keep yourself fed.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
The issue with modern militaries isn't that they'd lose on the field of battle. Obviously a tank brigade or a attack helicopter brigade is going to slaughter any number of zombies. The issue is that how many zombies can a tank kill if it's out of ammunition? How many zombies can a helicopter eliminate if it's out of fuel? Modern militaries are gigantic machines that run on an enormously complex logistical tail. The more disruptions they face the harder it is to fight.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

admittedly it was pretty funny that WWZ actually makes the zombies immune to pressure and blast force so that artillery fails to work on them in a crucial scene leading to the collapse of the military against them

just kinda magic defenses for the zombie threat lol
 
There is also the issue that the usual way zombie viruses spread is kinda crap, no plague virus relies on something as awkward as biting.
 
Tyran said:
There is also the issue that the usual way zombie viruses spread is kinda crap, no plague virus relies on something as awkward as biting.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's funny that Resident Evil, for all it takes from zombie movies, has waterborne speading as the main vector for the T-Virus outbreak. Biting is also considered a vector but it's explicitly a secondary one

DestinyPlayer said:
I mean... Rabies
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I tought of that, but rabies is way slower in speading compared to your usual zombie virus. Rabies outbreaks also tend to be small, not city-wide or nation-wide outbreaks.
 
Flare said:
It's funny that Resident Evil, for all it takes from zombie movies, has waterborne speading as the main vector for the T-Virus outbreak. Biting is also considered a vector but it's explicitly a secondary one
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Zombie outbreaks in the RE games are also always contained, and pretty much always caused by artifically spreading it.

The movies though are just stupid.
 
Rabies does quite well for itself in its ecological niche. A zombie virus that mimicked it would also be very 'successful' in the evolutionary sense since sporadic small outbreaks would probably reduce efforts to combat it significantly. Wouldn't be as dramatic, but I think there could actually be some fun stories to be had around a world with those kind of outbreaks.

well... 'fun' in the sense of entertaining, they'd probably be pretty fuckin grim.
 
yrsillar said:
Rabies does quite well for itself in its ecological niche. A zombie virus that mimicked it would also be very 'successful' in the evolutionary sense since sporadic small outbreaks would probably reduce efforts to combat it significantly. Wouldn't be as dramatic, but I think there could actually be some fun stories to be had around a world with those kind of outbreaks.

well... 'fun' in the sense of entertaining, they'd probably be pretty fuckin grim.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The thing is that plagues aren't just viruses in their ecological niches, but viruses that for some reason or other managed to break into a new environment that allows almost unprecedented expansion. And by new environment I mean human civilization.

Rabies does quite will in its ecological niche, but it isn't a plague virus.
 
Night of the Living Dead, probably the zombie film just about everyone thinks of, is very much a localized situation, just some zombies going about a small town with the main characters trapped in a house, in the end it is cleared up by a bunch of guys with shotguns. I think that is probably the most 'realistic' depiction of what would go down with a disease like that
 
Most other examples of relatively plausible world-wide Zombie Apocalypses have a tendency to make it so that the virus isn't actually transmitted exclusively via bite, instead being airborne and biting just being something that gets through the immunity of the few people who aren't normally susceptible to it. Left 4 Dead, Project Zomboid, maybe 7 Days to Die?

Bizarre that most relatively realistic examples come from video games though.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Most other examples of relatively plausible world-wide Zombie Apocalypses have a tendency to make it so that the virus isn't actually transmitted exclusively via bite, instead being airborne and biting just being something that gets through the immunity of the few people who aren't normally susceptible to it. Left 4 Dead, Project Zomboid, maybe 7 Days to Die?

Bizarre that most relatively realistic examples come from video games though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Games usually have military protagonists that have the means to protect themselves from airborne viruses.

Movies and shows though usually have "everyday John" protagonists that have to be able to survive with a baseball bat and maybe an old shotgun if they are lucky.

That inherently means game zombies tend to be more impressive and capable (and often have physics defying capabilities and mutations to compete against machine guns and rocket launchers) than live action zombies.
 
Last edited:
Tyran said:
There is also the issue that the usual way zombie viruses spread is kinda crap, no plague virus relies on something as awkward as biting.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I will note that my personal favorite was from one webcomic I can't find anymore, but basically everyone is infected. It's just symptons won't trigger without specific enzymes entering the body to trigger the virus. Most which come from bite, but since zombies can fall into water, there is always a risk that drinking unpurified water might cause you to accidentally digest those enzymes.

Also why burning bodies turned out to be a bad idea. Sure, 80% of the enzyme compounds broke down and became harmless. Issue was that 20% that was now airborn and could be breathen in at any time, starting a chain reaction.
 
Mira Grant used versions of that twice, where rapid zombification worked because the active agent was already in the victims, the "turning" was an activation rather than initial infection.
Mandemon said:
Also why burning bodies turned out to be a bad idea. Sure, 80% of the enzyme compounds broke down and became harmless. Issue was that 20% that was now airborn and could be breathen in at any time, starting a chain reaction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That sounds biochemically implausible, I say about a zombie setting conceit.
 
Mandemon said:
I will note that my personal favorite was from one webcomic I can't find anymore, but basically everyone is infected. It's just symptons won't trigger without specific enzymes entering the body to trigger the virus. Most which come from bite, but since zombies can fall into water, there is always a risk that drinking unpurified water might cause you to accidentally digest those enzymes.

Also why burning bodies turned out to be a bad idea. Sure, 80% of the enzyme compounds broke down and became harmless. Issue was that 20% that was now airborn and could be breathen in at any time, starting a chain reaction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That reminds me of another such concept that pops up every now and again, mostly in web-media but apparently also in the Walking Dead setting.

Literally everyone is infected, and there's nothing special that's required to activate it. You just have to die, and then you're a zombie, no matter how you died so long as your corpse is still mostly intact.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
That reminds me of another such concept that pops up every now and again, mostly in web-media but apparently also in the Walking Dead setting.

Literally everyone is infected, and there's nothing special that's required to activate it. You just have to die, and then you're a zombie, no matter how you died so long as your corpse is still mostly intact.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think that applies right back to Night of the Living Dead? Doesn't have to be any infection thing really. Zombies are fantasy monsters at root even if they're more often than not soft-sf associated now.
 
Classic zombies can be reliably killed by a posse with guns or even just a bunch of burly guys with axes and chainmail, and the logistics tails for those are very small. The points about a modern military's logistic weaknesses (and contemporary society's social weaknesses) are well put, but you don't need the full might of a modern military to take out zombies.
 
NemoMarx said:
admittedly it was pretty funny that WWZ actually makes the zombies immune to pressure and blast force so that artillery fails to work on them in a crucial scene leading to the collapse of the military against them

just kinda magic defenses for the zombie threat lol
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
WWZ is a great example because it manages to simultaneously embody both my argument and also the silly "zombies beating the military" scenario lol.

The characters make it clear that the world's armies are losing because they're too stretched out, they're fighting in every city, town, and hamlet and in doing so are pushed to their breaking point. That's why the Redeker Plan is such a hail mary, it lets them consolidate and rebuild their supply lines. It's a perfect case study of the only way that zombies could logically prove to be a threat and how militaries might reverse course and win anyway.

But despite having that perfectly sensible explanation Brooks seemingly can't resist giving them the US military a single dramatic battle to lose because he just can't help shit on modern networked warfare. It's kind of hilarious.
 
Last edited:
Ford Prefect said:
Malcador literally tells someone that the intention is to do to the Astartes what was done to the Thunder Warriors, and in general Malcador does make it clear that he considers the desires of the Primarchs to be gloried to be totally pointless (in that short story where he nearly force chokes Horus to death, for the clearest example).

In the early HH books there's this persistent theme around the Space Marines wondering what point they'll have when the Great Crusade is done, and everything about the Primarch family drama and the future of their very many large adults sons is eventually contrasted against the Emperor doing all kinds of shady psychic science. The future he's building is for what he considers to be true humanity: psychic but not engineered. Magnus at least had a long term purpose and perhaps some of them might have been kept around (there's an ongoing bit about the Emperor wanting his own roomies across deep time), because in Fury of Magnus there's a vision of the intended future where Perturabo seems to be alive. But equally when the Emperor tries to get Magnus on side and Magnus brings up the issue of mutations among his legion the Emperor tells him that he'll just make him more.

Even without Malcador's statement on the matter the future looked pretty bleak. In the end, it's the Imperium of Man, not the Imperium of Gene Manipulated Superhumans.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Which depiction was that? Because his inner monologue in The End and the Death is very, very different to that. The Primarchs were all fated to die, eventually, but nothing in those books that I've seen suggests that the Emperor truly intended to cull them all.
 
Horologer said:
Classic zombies can be reliably killed by a posse with guns or even just a bunch of burly guys with axes and chainmail, and the logistics tails for those are very small. The points about a modern military's logistic weaknesses (and contemporary society's social weaknesses) are well put, but you don't need the full might of a modern military to take out zombies.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I would put this under the category of "it really depends", if we're talking about some small outbreak in the middle of nowhere involving a few dozen or a few hundred zombies at most then yeah a civilian militia could handle them fine. But the issue becomes that if everyone who is bitten becomes a zombie then you could see quite a snowball effect.

Just look at a major city, if there are hundreds of thousands of people present then there are hundreds of thousands of potential victims. At which point the period where civilians (or lightly armed paramilitaries like police) are able to meaningfully stop things is probably going to be very brief. Even slower zombies are going to find an abundance of prey and the more they infect the more dangerous they'll be.
 
Aineko said:
I think that applies right back to Night of the Living Dead? Doesn't have to be any infection thing really. Zombies are fantasy monsters at root even if they're more often than not soft-sf associated now.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It applies to all the Romero films. In Land of the Dead they get a zombie inside the secure gated community because someone commits suicide and Diary of the Dead opens with a murder-suicide and those people turn into zombies too.
 
Tyran said:
Games usually have military protagonists that have the means to protect themselves from airborne viruses.

Movies and shows though usually have "everyday John" protagonists that have to be able to survive with a baseball bat and maybe an old shotgun if they are lucky.

That inherently means game zombies tend to be more impressive and capable (and often have physics defying capabilities and mutations to compete against machine guns and rocket launchers) than live action zombies.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Apart from that, games also tend to work along the lines of "textures" and "skeleton rigging" and "models", meaning they can go quite large with Special Zombie types.

Meanwhile, movies and shows which rely on being live-action have to consider the SFX and costuming budget.

So I think the "hordes of human-sized and human-shaped zombies" tend to be the domain of live-action shows, while in games those types are usually bullet fodder, but the Specials are the real threat, and can range from "huge Hulk-like bosses" to "literal zombie dragons".

Tangentially, I did notice zombie games of the shooter variety not always having military protagonists, but often "everyday people" who nevertheless have access to an impressive amount of military arms; the Left 4 Dead series kind of exemplifies this.

And then there's the cases where the zombie outbreak is actual magic necromancy, but in those cases "civilian" and "trained soldier" tends to blur for the magic-casting protagonists.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top